This invention relates to a preparation for iron supply, a preparation for vitamin supply and a method for stabilizing a foam preparation, which are capable of supplying iron or vitamins to a living body.
In the living body, iron is important as an essential element of hemoglobin, and normal man ordinally intakes the necessary amount of iron from food. That is to say, iron is absorbed in the bivalent form into all digestive tubes, especially the small intestine (mainly the duodenum), then is oxided to the tervalent form in a mucosa cell, and enters the blood stream to bond with transferrin (.beta..sub.1 -globulin) which is a carrier protein, thereby transferred to the liver, pancreas, bone marrow and the like which are storage organs.
It is said that an excretion amount of iron per day in the normal man is about 0.5 to 1 mg. This excretion amount means the necessary intake amount per day of man.
In general, however, the absorption rate of iron from food is a low level of several percents. Due to this low absorption rate, the living body frequently falls into an extraphysiologic state such as iron deficiency anemia. As example of iron deficiency anemia, green sickness (chlorosis), catapletic hypochromic anemia, hypochromic anemia in gestation, hypochromic anemia in gastrointestinal disease and the like are known.
Recently, for the purpose of improvement of such extraphysiologic state, i.e. prevention and therapy of anemia, various iron compound preparations (hematinics) are known. For example, DE 3632334 A1 discloses an oral administration iron preparation and a foam tablet basing the same, including iron gluconate as a water soluble iron salt, ascorbic acid, and CO.sub.2 generating compound, e.g. sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate.
However, the foam tablet containing iron gluconate is inferior in water solubility, and therefore it takes a fairly long time from putting it into water to taking it. Also, the above foam tablet tastes bad, so that it is hard to drink. Furthermore, since the water content of iron gluconate is comparatively large, i.e. 6.5 to 10% (dihydrate), the foam tablet has a disadvantage in that it takes a fairly long time to dry the tablet in a process for manufacturing, or that in the process employing a drying step, e.g. a process employing a method for directly pessurizing powder, method for dry pressurizing granules or the like, a troublesome problem occurs in that water included in materials should be sufficiently lowered. If removing water is insufficient, foaming of the tablet occurs. Accordingly, the drying step becomes troublesome, and further the use of a drying device results in complications. A similar problem also occurs in a foam tablet for supplying vitamin such as vitamin C, and it is inferior in reservation stability, even if using a drying agent.